Towards Automatic Design of Reflective Optical Systems

Traditional optical design processes can only obtain a few design solutions after a time-consuming trial-and-error process. During this process, how to select the numbers and sequence of surfaces of different types (spherical, aspherical, and freeform) required by the system remains a difficult problem. Currently, no automatic design method is available for reflective optical systems that contain multiple surface types. Therefore, an automatic design framework for reflective systems is proposed that can output a series of design results with various combinations of surface types automatically after input specifications and constraints. In the first design example, 76 design results with imaging qualities near the diffraction limit are obtained that have 11 different surface type combinations. This framework realizes the automatic design of this type of system, paving the way toward general automatic optical design and significantly improving the efficiency of the optical design process. Using this framework, the numbers and sequence of the surfaces of different types required by the optical system can be determined reasonably, solving a difficult problem that has long puzzled designers. The proposed framework reduces the requirement for design experience and allows more people to participate in optical design processes.